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So yeah, currently I've got the "proper way to play" which I'm trying to work out, including roughly how many pieces of evidence should be produced during a winning gameplay run. After that I gotta figure out how to avoid any broken/exploit strategies. Clearly blood magic needs a lot of fixing and playtesting, but evidence spam in general should be something we can give heroes some way to counter. Maybe let them investigate many pieces of evidence at once if they're getting overwhelmed, if they can get the rulers to help them.

For the "no evidence" gameplay, I feel the best solution is going to be to have evidence created over time. Ideally "no evidence" should be a viable strategy, but slow, and shouldn't actually ever result in humanity never building any defences. My current thinking is that if you're spreading shadow effectively or infiltrating everywhere but producing absolutely no evidence the Chosen One and aware heroes should go and do investigations of their own and produce their own evidence. It's not perfect, but would have some gameplay options for how to delay it, and would avoid this strategy becoming too OP. I was also thinking on higher difficulties the Elder Tomb would produce evidence from time to time (maybe every time a seal breaks). I want to avoid this as much as possible, because I don't want a fixed schedule in the game, to keep it flexible, but we gotta make sure the correct strategy isn't to play extremely slowly and win the most boring game ever after 5000 turns.
Another strategy I've got a note to fix but haven't yet is "gather a million gold before making any cult at all, suddenly give it all to the orcs and steamroll everyone before they can react". I might just limit the amount of gold an agent can carry, to fix that one.